Yours Truly!
About a month before the last Canadian Federal Election, Enter Stage Right, a site popular with some of my conservative compatriots in the Canadian blogosphere, ran an article titled Victoria Day and the Life and Death of Traditional Canada. It inspired one of my more popular entries in this blog, the “My Canada Includes Accordion Guy” article, which got a lot of enthusiastic response in the comments and only one hand-wringing “maybe the problem is YOU!” semi-rebuttal from a knee-jerk conservative in another blog’s comments.
The
reason that a lot of us are loath to support the Conservative Party is that
we suspect that they a lot of them don’t like us. It wasn’t that long
ago that it was once the Reform Party.
This was the party of Bob Ringma, who suggested that gays
and “ethnics” could be fired or “moved to the back of the
shop,” if the employer thought that would help business.
We left the Philippines in 1975, not to suckle on the Canadian welfare teat, but because President Ferdinand Marcos
declared martial law and the democratic system was replaced by a
military dictatorship. We left for the same reasons many longer-time
Canadians’ ancestors did: to seek out a better life.
We came
here with skills: Dad’s an obstetrician-gynecologist, Mom’s a
cardiologist and both trained both in the Philippines and in the U.S..
My sister and I were educated here, and she ended up following the
family trade and became a doctor of community medicine and works at the
Peel Region Board of Health.
I’m the “black sheep” of the family
— I have only a bachelor’s degree and went into computer programming.
Even so, my work history speaks for itself: I’ve worked for Mackerel
Interactive Multimedia, one of Canada’s highly-regarded interactive multimedia companies, then one of Canada’s most ambitious dot-coms and finally Tucows, one of Canada’s best-known internet companies.
Simply put: if we took benefits from Canada, we paid them back in spades.
A
favourite bogeyman of Conservative supporters is that immigrants are
often the thin edge of the wedge, sponsoring the rest of the clan for
immigration as soon as they get their citizenship papers. In 31 years
here, the only one in my family who’s ever sponsored someone to
immigrate here is me. I’m sponsoring my wife, who last worked at
Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society.
We
understand that a wide-open-door policy would be disastrous, but at the
same time, we don’t subscribe to the belief that many Conservative
supporters seem to — that all people who don’t look like descendants
of the Family Compact or Chateau Clique are subhumans out to bleed the country dry.
There’s
lots of common ground shared by immigrants of my ilk and some of
Conservative supporters. Most of us were lucky enough to have parents
who bypassed a lot of North American baby boomer culture and its
extended adolescence, and thus didn’t have to “raise our parents while
raising ourselves” (I suspect that this is the source of a the
wooly-headedness amongst people some of the people who vote for the NDP
by reflex). We come from cultures where hard work is valued, capitalism
isn’t a dirty word and ambition is a virtue. And we do love a Tim Horton’s
double-chocolate donut. It may not be the land of our birth, but it’s
the land we chose to call home, just like your forebears did. Like
them, we hope to leave the place a little better than we found it.
If
the Conservative Party wants my vote, they’ll have to convince me that
they’re not the same as the party from which they grew. They’ll have to
convince me that they’ve moved beyond the “Every since my family came
to Canada, we’ve had nothing but crap from the immigrants” mindset.
I know some Conservative campaigners and supporters who aren’t cut from
the Bob Ringma mold, and with whom I’ve shared a pint of Upper Canada
Dark, so I know that someday, I may be convinced.
Tomorrow is not that day.
Now it can be told: my wife, Wendy Koslow, is the Editor-in-Chief of Top 10 Sources. Congrats, Wendy!
